


WIPS and Snippits

by Rowantreeisme



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Angst, Deaf Character, Gen, Hurt Tony, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, and other things
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-04
Updated: 2019-04-10
Packaged: 2020-01-04 13:02:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18344228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rowantreeisme/pseuds/Rowantreeisme
Summary: Various unfinished works that I wasn't planning on publishing or finishing. Maybe i'll get more inspiration/to continue them at some point. Who knows.





	1. Solace

**Author's Note:**

> this is just. Tony Stark's Complicated Emotions Re: One Obidiah Stane. you're welcome.

They had a funeral, three days after the freeway battle. Two days after Tony had told the world that he was Iron Man. Two days after he hadn’t told them who was in the other suit.

It was a nice day out, sunny with just a little bit of clouds, scuttling across the sun. It was… surreal, almost. 

Because this… this was the end. This was the ending to the past three days, the past week, the past three and a half  _ months _ . 

All of that had led to this. 

It didn't feel real, not because it was unbelievable or shocking, but because it wasn't. It was completely and utterly ordinary. 

It didn't feel like all the pain, all the grief, all the scars and bodies and collateral damage, could lead to what amounted to a completely unremarkable funeral.

To Tony standing in front of a grave he could’ve filled three times over courtesy of the man they were burying, lying through his teeth and holding a bundle of marigolds so tightly in his fist that the stems were cutting into his palm. 

Or, not lying. Not entirely. 

Because he was mourning, he was mourning the man he’d thought of as a father, the man who, at times, was the  _ only _ person who’d believed in him, the man who’d stood behind him decades ago and almost in the same place, when he was so,  _ so  _ much younger, the man who’d flown coast to coast to appease the board and brought him pizza whenever he did.

The man who’d nearly succeeded in killing him. 

Tony almost couldn’t believe it, really. Couldn’t quite mesh Obie, his friend, and Stane, the man who’d torn his heart right out of his chest and ruined  _ so _ many lives and sold weapons to terrorists and made all of this  _ necessary _ , into one person. Into someone who did  _ all _ of those things. 

So he gave an empty speech to an empty coffin, grieved for the man who’d done all of that and  _ more _ , the man he’d  _ killed _ , and hated himself for it.

\---

Tony locked himself in his lab as soon as he got home. As soon as he’d managed to dodge the press and the well-wishers whose words bit like poison and every  _ single _ person offering their condolences, he’d driven home, which might’ve been unadvisable, but he’d done it anyway, straight into the garage and initiated a lockdown even before the car was entirely stopped.

He slumped against the wall, away from where the shattered reactor casing was still lying, knees up to his chest, and tried to breathe. Tried to get  _ some _ air, trying to stop from screaming or sobbing or just… stopping, trying to force himself to  _ calm the fuck down _ .

“J-” He choked, he had to- he had to- he had to  _ breathe _ , because he wasn’t and his vision was dimming and this was fucking  _ pathetic _ , he couldn’t- what, he couldn’t  _ do  _ this, he couldn’t mourn the person who had ruined  _ so much _ , had torn apart so many  _ lives _ , he couldn't  _ miss  _ him, because-

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair for all the people he had, Stane had, killed. It wasn’t fair to grieve and be  _ relieved _ at the same time.

This was his mess. He wasn’t- he wasn’t innocent, here. He’d fucked up, hadn’t  _ looked _ , hadn’t _ cared _ , and he’d gotten people killed.

This was all on him. All of it. Yinsen, and Gulmira, and the soldiers in the humvee,  _ everything _ .

And he couldn’t breathe. 

He couldn’t breathe, so he wrapped his arms around his legs and pulled them so tight it  _ hurt _ , hurt in his chest and in his arms and the bruises that still hadn’t healed from where Stane’s monstrosity of a suit had backhanded him across the roof. 

“J, just- talk. Please. Just- just let me-” He started, around half-breaths that didn’t sit right in his lungs, and he couldn’t say the rest, couldn’t say that he was terrified that JARVIS wouldn’t respond, just as terrified as he was the moment before Stane had taken the reactor, the moment he realized that JARVIS should’ve stopped him, and that meant-

“I am here, Sir.” JARVIS said, warm and steady and  _ still here _ , and Tony bowed his head and the thing that had been caught up somewhere between his throat and his stomach bubbled up, half a sob and half a relieved laugh, as JARVIS recited meaningless data, meaningless lists and words and that was… that was a grocery list, now. That was a grocery list and they needed more  _ everything _ , more eggs and fruits and vegetables and tissue paper, really it was a miracle he didn’t have scurvy, at this point, and when his hand came up to rub at his eye something soft brushed his face.

He was still- he was still holding a marigold, and he forced his blurry eyes to focus on it, blinked away the fuzziness.

It was red and yellow, and he smiled a little, despite himself. He hadn’t picked the flowers, Pepper had insisted that she handle it for him, even though she’d been hurt too, even though her hands were shaking as she said it. Maybe… maybe that’d been a mistake, looking back on it. Remembering how Pepper had practically been vibrating with fury when he’d finally gotten himself off the roof. 

The armour, back in its case across from him, newly cleaned and repaired during the days after when he couldn’t sleep, couldn’t do anything, really, but obsessively check and re-check and  _ work _ , shone.

Red and yellow. A match. 

It was fitting.


	2. Hard of Hear(t)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> listen you cannot get that close to a bomb without thoroughly fucking up your ears. so. deaf!tony fic? deaf!tony fic.

So, he’d still had  _ some _ hearing left. Not much, not enough to be in any way usable, or fixable. Too little to make anything other than relying on Yinsen to translate, so that Tony could read his lips, an option. Not enough for shouted words to mean  _ anything _ at all.

Enough, apparently, for the damned screechpen to do it’s job. Enough that he could hear  _ that _ , the sound like nails scraping across his skull and worming into his brain and freezing him just as surely as a snake bite.

He didn’t realize until after the fight that the only thing he could still hear was the uneven drumbeat of his own heart.

 

He hides it. Of course he hides it, nothing in his life has  _ ever _ taught him that showing weakness is a good thing, Howard’s impersonal, cold instructions, as cold as the water the sharks like him swam in, Maria, a warm, clever guiding hand teaching him how not to get snapped up by the bigger fish.

It starts as glasses, simple, metal-rimmed, two tiny mics on each of the hinges, able to project what people are around him are saying onto the lens, what music is playing, data and subtitles of every noise around. And then, cause he’s a paranoid bastard at the best of times, and the little readout is pretty damn obvious, he manages to work the system into a contact lens. 

  
  


He still plays music, sometimes, sitting in the near-dark in front of a piano, coaxing the notes out like they’re something timid, something shy. He knows it still sounds the same as every other time he’s played, the movements etched into his muscles, his bones,  _ part _ of him, now, knows the timing and the pressure on the keys, as intimately as he knows the wiring of the suit, the lines of JARVIS’s code.

He knows the math behind the pitch and volume, how much force equals the singing of a note, how the sound softens, dampens, is pressed away when the key comes down. Knows the frequencies of each key and wire and note, can read the music just as easily as he could months ago.

He knows.

The piano lid slams down silently. 

He knows. That never makes it any easier.

 

He plays around with hearing aids, sometimes. Even though he knows they won’t help, short of wiring the thing directly into his auditory cortex. Makes them smaller, undetectable, makes them crisper and sharper and  _ better _ .

At least, that’s what JARVIS tells him. It’s not like he can test them himself.

If he uses Clint as a guinea pig, well, he’s certainly not complaining. 

 

Touch is the only thing that keeps him sane, keeps him anchored in the silence that seems to be pressing into him, crushing his skull and trying to drown him. 

Quick taps of the reactor, carried through his ribcage to his spine, right to his heart, and it almost feels like the bass line of the music he used to listen too. 

Sometimes, he plays around with the reactor, says he’s doing diagnostics, and in a way, he is. 

He needs to know just how much it can take, at what point power draw starts being too great for it to keep up, for it to slip into a slower rotation rate. He pushes it’s limits, probably more than he should, overclocking it and forcing it to spin faster than is really, truly, safe, skirting the line between too much and not enough. 

Of course, the real reason he does this is to feel the pitch change of the rotation frequency, the slip into  different energy state that feels, to all the world, like singing. 

  
  


He still dreams with sound. He wonders, sometimes, if that’s unusual, things, sometimes, of asking Clint. 

He still dreams in sound. That’s not as much of a comfort as it should be, because it’s never music. It’s never JARVIS’s voice. It’s never his mother playing the piano or Jarvis singing softly. It’s never Rhodey laughing at a bad joke or the rush of wind and surf, the crash of water on rocks.

The only thing he ever hears is the shatter-crack of a bomb detonating, replayed from perfect, horrible, memory.


	3. AI Tony thing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony dies during civil war, becomes an AI, all that good good shit.

Tony had always expected the AVALON protocol to be put into use at some point during his life. That was what he’d made it for, after all. Almost certainly sooner, rather than later. 

He hadn’t expected this. 

He expected… Well, he expected going down in the middle of a fight when his team couldn’t afford for him to go down. He expected to have to  _ fight _ . 

He’d expected going down fighting on the  _ same _ side as his (former) friends. Not against them. Never, ever, against them. 

Guess even he had blind spots, things even he couldn’t predict. 

And now he was left sitting, in the dark, in worse than the dark, in the  _ silence _ , waiting for FRIDAY to come pick him up. He couldn’t move, either, because all of the suit’s reserve power was currently dedicated to keeping him conscious, and he wasn’t willing to give that up.

He was going to have to fix that.

Sure, he had other senses, kinda, temperature sensors on the outside of the suit translating to  _ fucking freezing _ in his mind, radiation sensors that translated to somewhere between sight and taste, pressure and distance and a decent sense of how he (not him, the suit,  _ not his body _ ) was lying, how he was positioned, and, well...

Tony had done tests on the AVALON protocol before, of course. Of  _ course _ he had. But, that had been in a controlled environment. In the lab, in a functioning suit. And then, he hadn’t exactly predicted just  _ how _ the damage indicators would translate to what was still, basically, a human brain. 

Turns out it translated into pain. 

(He would have to fix that, too.)

And the suit was pretty damn damaged. 

He was trying not to think about the giant crack through the center of the chest plate. He was not succeeding. 

Sure, it wasn’t the  _ worst _ pain he’d ever felt, not worse than a couple minutes ago, when he’d still been… alive, for lack of a better word, not even top 20, if he was listing them.

But it still  _ hurt _ . The dents in the metal like bruises, scratches and scrapes and the divots in the gauntlet, and of course, the crack right through the reactor. 

And the cold.

Definitely going to fix that. 

He couldn’t fix the fact that he’d trusted someone he shouldn't've and died for his troubles. He couldn’t fix the fact that he really,  _ really _ should’ve know better. He couldn’t fix the fact that he was one of six corpses in this fucking hell of a Hydra base.

He could fix his code, fix his mind, when he got back  home to the compound.

But for now, all he could do, was wait.

\---

4 hours, 34 minutes, and 12.5 seconds later, he picked up a ping, that oddly, sounded like someone tapping on the side of an empty glass, and nearly sighed in relief. 

_ You would not believe how glad I am to hear from you, Fri _ . 

Communicating was weird, like this. Like thinking, almost, translated to code and back, but more direct. More precise. 

_ You too, Boss. Is- _

_ AVALON is working fine. _ Tony replied, a little too hurried because really, it wasn’t. He was tired and in pain and freezing and that was  _ wrong _ , because he didn’t have a  _ body _ anymore, his brain was a computer, a little black box full of code inside the suit and he shouldn’t be  _ able _ to feel pain.

(He should’ve been able to fix that, at least.)

_ Permission to board?  _ He asked instead, because he really,  _ really _ wanted to be out of the busted suit he was currently inhabiting, and felt a brush of…  _ something _ along the edges of his senses, pink and warm and  _ massive  _ and-

Oh. That was Friday. That was the elegant, woven web of Friday’s code and she was  _ beautiful _ , and if  _ anything _ good at all had come from this mess, from  _ dying _ , it was this. It was seeing Friday how she  _ was _ , not the incomplete representation that was holograms or projections on screens, it was finally being able to  _ see  _ her.

And Friday was preening, even as she nudged him out of the broken suit and into the older one she was flying, the rush of wind and cold and  _ bright bright bright _ nearly overwhelming for a second, snow and clouds and mountains spread below him, real-time vector overlays of the wind.  _ You wanna drive, Boss?  _ She asked, and he shook his head, but still took up space alongside her, connecting to the cameras and pressure sensors and all of the pieces of information that weren’t screaming  _ damage _ at him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this was originally inspired by the good place scene with janet saying "attention, i have been murdered" but we CLEARLY did not get there with this one. please enjoy anyways.

**Author's Note:**

> Marigold Symbolism or Why You Should Never Use Them At A Funeral: Grief, jealousy, cruelty, desire for riches.   
> so, maybe a little too on the nose.


End file.
